Progress Slow in City Goal to Fire Bad Teachers

The Bloomberg administration has made getting rid of inadequate teachers a linchpin of its efforts to improve city schools. But in the two years since the Education Department began an intensive effort to root out such teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence.

Ten others whom the department charged with incompetence settled their cases by resigning or retiring, and nine agreed to pay fines of a few thousand dollars or take classes, or both, so they could keep their jobs. One teacher lost his job before his case was decided, after the department called immigration officials and his visa was revoked. The cases of more than 50 others are awaiting arbitration.

Lawyers for the department said an additional 418 teachers had left the system after finding out that they could face charges of incompetence. Because no formal charges were brought in these cases, the number is hard to corroborate; officials from the teachers’ union said they doubted it was that high.

Ridding schools of subpar teachers has become one of the signature issues of national education reformers, but the results in New York City show that, as is true in many school systems around the country, the process is not easy.

The city’s effort includes eight full-time lawyers, known as the Teacher Performance Unit, and eight retired principals and administrators who serve as part-time consultants to help principals build cases against teachers. Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, said that the team, whose annual budget is $1 million, had been “successful at a far too modest level” but that it was “an attempt to work around a broken system.”

Mr. Klein and his boss, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said they were hampered by cumbersome state laws that had been heavily influenced by the teachers’ union here, although many of the rules that govern the cases were agreed to by the city.

“The process makes it virtually impossible to remove a teacher within a reasonable amount of time,” Mr. Klein said in an interview. “Nobody thinks that the number of cases is reflective of the teachers who should be removed.”

Such complaints have put teachers’ unions on the defensive. Last month, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and the former head of New York City’s union, promised to study the issue of removing teachers and asked Kenneth R. Feinberg, who allocated compensation to families of Sept. 11 victims and most recently worked with the Obama administration on executive pay, to develop a more efficient system.

Mr. Klein has been speaking with the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s union, about amending the process. But Michael Mulgrew, Ms. Weingarten’s successor as president of the New York union, said that even without changes in state law, the process of removing a teacher could be accelerated; he declined to elaborate.

“The amount of time that these cases take is no good for anyone,” Mr. Mulgrew said. “Everybody wants a good teacher in every classroom. If everybody has a willingness to speed up, I don’t believe it needs to take this long.”

A glimpse inside the hearing of one veteran teacher this month showed how drawn out the process can become.

Inside a barren room near City Hall, the teacher, Michael Ebewo, sat at a table as the principal of the Manhattan middle school where he had taught for years, Isaac Newton Middle School for Math and Science, began to go through each of the many deficiencies she said she had found in his classroom.

There was a chart with misspellings and unclear instructions. There were students staring into space and doodling rather than completing their worksheet, which contained questions that the students, who were in special education, had difficulty understanding. Rather than pressing the students for answers, Mr. Ebewo simply answered himself, making the students only more confused.

At the time of that visit, the principal, Lisa Nelson, criticized Mr. Ebewo, who had been teaching for 15 years, for not having proper behavior incentives and consequences for the students. The next time she came to the classroom, Ms. Nelson said, he distributed candy to students early in the morning, something she said “even a layperson” would object to.

Mr. Ebewo’s lawyer interrupted with objections more than two dozen times, but the arbitrator overruled him in nearly every instance. The hearing, which covered lessons dating to 2005, lasted four hours. The principal was only the first of several witnesses the Education Department would call to try to prove that Mr. Ebewo was unfit to be in any classroom.

Mr. Ebewo, through his lawyer, declined to comment for this article. His case took years to reach a hearing because of a state law that requires the city to show evidence that it has given the teacher a chance to improve and instruction on how to do so. Any missing file could jeopardize a case, lawyers for the department said.

And the hearing will probably go on for months, because of a rule the city agreed to four years ago. In an effort to impose more order on the process, the city and the union agreed to set up a panel of arbitrators to hear such cases regularly. There are only so many arbitrators, however, and lawyers can handle only so many cases at once, so the arbitrators hear a case only five days a month.

Howard C. Edelman, who has been an arbitrator on teacher cases for 20 years, said it was hard to judge the success of the city’s effort “because these are the hardest cases.” He said he preferred hearing cases of misconduct — for example, a teacher accused of corporal punishment — to hearing cases of incompetence.

“What you have 99 percent of the time is an administrator testifying about something they observed one and a half to three years ago,” he said. “They try to refresh their memory before the hearing, but you get into these arcane issues of were you asking a pivotal question of the students, and what are pivotal questions?”

One arbitrator recently stepped down from a case after the department said he had fallen asleep during a hearing. (The arbitrator said he might have “dropped off once or twice.”) The urge is not uncommon. Alan R. Viani, another arbitrator, said he had done “one or two cases, and it made me want to put a bullet through my head.”

In general, the department considers bringing incompetence cases when teachers have received consecutive unsatisfactory ratings from their principal. There are currently 190 teachers who have received at least two consecutive unsatisfactory ratings in the past three school years, and 586 more who received such a rating last year.

Fifty-five teachers are currently facing incompetence charges, eight others are in arbitration and one is awaiting a decision from a recently completed arbitration.

Mr. Klein has encouraged principals to judge teachers more critically. The number of unsatisfactory ratings has increased to 1.8 percent of all tenured teachers for the last two years, compared with 1.2 percent in 2006. The chancellor has also pushed principals to be more stringent with tenure decisions, since it is far easier to remove a teacher who has not earned tenure. Last year, 93 percent of eligible teachers obtained tenure after the end of their three-year probationary periods.

While their cases drag on, teachers receive full pay and must report to one of the department’s so-called rubber rooms, where they spend each school day with other teachers facing charges of incompetence or misconduct. Education officials say they pay $30 million a year to such teachers.

In current contract negotiations, the city has proposed changing legal standards to make it easier to remove teachers and has said those teachers should be suspended without pay while their arbitration cases proceed. If teachers are later reinstated, the department would have to pay their salaries and an additional 50 percent in back pay.

Lucienne Mohammed, the third teacher to be fired for incompetence since the advent of the Teacher Performance Unit, was found to have repeatedly failed to plan lessons properly and to correct students who gave wrong answers, and to have had a classroom that was “consistently disorganized,” according to the arbitrator’s ruling.

Ms. Mohammed, who did not return phone calls seeking comment, was dismissed more than three years after the principal of Public School 65, Daisy Garcia, moved to remove her from the classroom and nearly a year after her trial began. Officials of the Education Department say that including her salary, the case cost them $230,000, in addition to the nearly $150,000 the state paid for the arbitrator and the cost of preparing more than 16,000 pages of transcripts.

The department managed to get rid of one teacher, Casey A. Phillip, without waiting for the arbitrator’s ruling because his work visa was revoked.

A State Supreme Court judge later ruled that it was clear that the Education Department had suggested to the Department of Homeland Security that Mr. Phillip, a citizen of Antigua, should lose his visa because he had been suspended from his job. The judge said the department had no obligation to do so. The judge ruled that while Mr. Phillip might eventually have been dismissed because of incompetence, he deserved back pay for the three months between the time he lost his visa and the date it would have expired on its own.

A version of this article appears in print on February 24, 2010, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Progress Slow in Bloomberg Goal To Rid Schools of Bad Teachers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe